The Message Systems Blog

Getting Rid of Transactional Email? Fresh, Not Stale

The Transactional Email News Digest

We’re kicking off a new feature on the blog: a “news of note” compendium of recent articles from around the Web on transactional messaging. The title I’m using is a little arbitrary (especially the “email” part) as I imagine we will include items on notifications, alerts and other kinds of automated messages that fall under the transactional umbrella, which could also include texts and push notifications. Also, I left out any reference to publishing schedule (weekly, monthly) for the simple reason that articles and posts on transactional messaging tend to be fewer and farther between than news on subjects like email marketing, spam, or messaging security. If we can make it into a regular feature, great. But for starters we’ll keep it casual.

Fresh, Not Stale
Interesting discussion on devthought around how to solve the problem of receiving and managing transactional notifications in multiple places. We’ve all experienced this – someone direct messages you on Twitter, or you get a new connection request on LinkedIn. A transactional email arrives in your inbox, but that message is also in your Tweetdeck app or waiting for you when you logon at LinkedIn. You might have responded to it online already, but the message is still in your inbox. LearnBoost’s CTO Guillermo Rauch has some ideas on how to address the issue of getting the same piece of information in several different spots.

MailChimp Launches Mandrill for WordPress
MailChimp has provided transactional email capabilities for about a year now through its Mandrill product, and now they’ve expanded their offerings with an API plugin for the WordPress platform. The wpMandrill plugin is free, and once installed and configured, it overrides the standard emailing function WordPress uses. So essentially your can rout all of your WordPress emails through Mandrill, giving you deliverability, tracking and reporting capabilities. For small companies using WordPress as an e-commerce site, this means you’ll have the ability to send a full array of transactional email, alerts and notifications, including invoices, receipts, shipping notifications, comment updates, account password reminders and more.

Where’s Transactional Messaging Going in 2013?
In an annual predictions post, The Latest SMTP News tells us that the volume of transactional messages will grow in 2013. Pretty safe bet there and not exactly news, but the rest of the post makes some interesting points, among them: “88% of people check emails on their mobiles on a daily basis.” The point being that given how many B2C email interactions happen on smartphones today, companies need to rethink what they’re doing with their email content, and their overall email strategies.